Mr. Sparapani said he was not reassured by the role that the law envisages for the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which would monitor the program and report to Congress as the three-year sunset approached.

“The board is stacked four [Republicans] to one [Democrat],” he said.

“It is not truly independent” because it is inside the president’s own office, which puts it “under the thumb of the president and his advisers.”

But it receives an unfazed response from an anonymous Democratic staffer:

A Democratic committee staffer defended the proposal, saying the exemptions were “narrowly drawn to address the kinds of problems we found during our September 11 inquiry” when U.S. agencies failed to pool information about known al Qaeda militants, who were, thus, able to slip into the country.

I agree with this latter response. Inadequate information-sharing among federal agencies prevented the possible disruption of the 9/11 plot, and numerous analyses – most notably those of the Markle Task Force and the 9/11 Commission – have highlighted the need for better information-sharing among key counterterrorism agencies. This legislative proposal seems consistent with their sensible recommendations.

I’m not sure that this exemption will make much of a difference in terms of counterterror effectiveness, given the fact that the primary inhibitors of information-sharing among intelligence agencies today are cultural factors, not legal restrictions. But I don’t see any harm in having a pilot project to test the proposition.

Law enforcement agencies, that we usually call the police, are designated by the government to serve and protect us. In order to be effective, police officers must be provided with proper police equipment. Their and our safety depends on the quality of…